The processing and handling of mailpieces consumes an enormous amount of human and financial resources, particularly if the processing of the mailpieces is done manually. The processing and handling of mailpieces not only takes place at the Postal Service, but also occurs at each and every business or other site where communication via the mail delivery system is utilized. That is, various pieces of mail generated by a plurality of departments and individuals within a company need to be addressed, collected, sorted and franked as part of the outgoing mail process. Additionally, incoming mail needs to be collected and sorted efficiently to ensure that it gets to the addressee in a minimal amount of time. Since much of the documentation and information being conveyed through the mail system is critical in nature relative to the success of a business, it is imperative that the processing and handling of the mailpieces be done efficiently and reliably so as not to negatively impact the functioning of the business.
In view of the above, various automated mail handling machines have been developed for processing mail (removing individual pieces of mail from a stack and performing subsequent actions on each individual piece of mail). Individual mailpieces are separated from a stack, read using an optical character recognition system (OCR) and compared to an addressee database in order to determine the appropriate destination points for delivery of the mailpieces. The addressee database can contain hundreds or even thousands of individual addressee names, such as names of employees of a company for which incoming mailpieces are being sorted for delivery. In addition to incoming mail, the mailpiece sorting apparatus can also handle interoffice mailpieces which are pre-addressed and then sorted using the incoming mailpiece sorting apparatus and performing a process much like that of sorting incoming mailpieces, i.e. reading the addressee, determining the destination and delivering the mailpiece to the appropriate sort bin.
For interoffice mailpieces, this process is duplicative in that the company is printing the addressees for each interoffice mailpiece from a database separate from the mailpiece sorting apparatus and with printing equipment separate from the incoming mailpiece sorting apparatus.
Thus, one of the problems of the prior art is that it does not provide stream lined preparation of internal mailings. Another problem of the prior art is that it is time consuming and costly. Another problem of the prior art is that it is dependent upon multiple databases and/or requires updating of addressee information at several databases within a company. Therefore, a system and method that allow for easy addressing and sorting of internal/business to employee mailings is needed.